by Craig Weber
Like a smart new runner, don’t try to cover too much distance at once. Focus on a couple of high-leverage practices to bring more balance to your current behavioral patterns and then slowly adopt more practices. This is important, for in the same way that novice runners can burn themselves out by pushing too hard too fast, you can limit your long-term learning by trying to do too much in a hurry. It’s best to build up your conversational capacity slowly, steadily, and resolutely.
Get Curious When You Fail
Face it. You’re going to trip up. You’re going to fumble the ball. Sometimes you’ll drop candor when you should speak up and take a stand. Other times you’ll ditch curiosity when you ought to keep quiet and listen. It’s going to happen. Just admit it. When you do slip, the important thing is not to waste the experience by getting overly self-critical and beating yourself up about it. It’s better to treat the experience as an opportunity to learn by getting curious and exploring it. “How interesting? In our meeting today I triggered into ‘win’ mode and called the sales guy a ‘hypo-frontal halfwit.’ What triggered me? And what would be a better way to manage my reaction next time I find myself in a similar situation?” Treat your lapses and slipups as opportunities to learn rather than occasions for self-flagellation.
Be Patient
Accept that progress will be deliberate and cumulative, not effortless and instant. You’ll do a brilliant job in a meeting in the morning, only to lose discipline and snap back to old habits that same afternoon. Don’t worry about it. Adopt the long perspective and focus on the trend over time.
Be Persistent
“Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles,” said Thomas Carlyle, “distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.” The ability to remain candid and curious under pressure is a discipline that takes practice to achieve. You must have the mental toughness to stick with it. Practicing for a week before giving up will yield the same result as practicing tennis for a week and then putting down your racket or practicing the piano for a week and then never again touching the keys.
Use Your Context
You don’t learn these skills in a vacuum, so look for opportunities to improve a process or relationship and use them as practice. At the very least, you’ll build your skills. At best, you’ll also inspire meaningful progress on an issue that matters.
Maintain “Structural Tension”
In his book, The Path of Least Resistance, the composer Robert Fritz suggests that creative energy comes from focusing on two things at once: Your current reality and a clear vision of where you want to go. Both are essential. So be brutally honest with yourself about your tendencies and your current ability to manage them well, while at the same time keeping a sharp focus on the conversational competence you want to achieve.
Take Your Ego to the Mat
To use it to its full advantage, take your ego to the mat and read the book in a humble, curious, compassionate way.* Focus on stretching the boundaries of your conversational competence and on how much you are learning, rather than inflating your sense of self-importance or how much you think you know.
Look in the Mirror
This is as much a warning as it is a suggestion: Beware of the urge to use the frameworks for blaming or shaming. Avoid the temptation to critically assess the behavior of others, and, instead, look in the mirror and critically assess your own. Yes, you need the ability to recognize when others are out of balance, but only so you can respond in a balanced way, not to judge them, mock them, or feel superior. Remember, as you build your conversational capacity, a sure sign of progress is that your humility is going up and your arrogance is going down.
As you build your conversational capacity, a sure sign of progress is your humility is going up and your arrogance is going down.
Have Fun
Adopt a serious yet playful attitude as you work through the pages. Then apply what you learned.
Make It Your Own
Experiment. Read other related material. Share what you’re doing and learning with others. Be creative. Use this book well and by the time you reach the last page it will be as much yours as it is mine.
Where We Go from Here
You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
—JANE GOODALL
To build the discipline to remain in the sweet spot—both candid and curious—in an important conversation, you’ll need to strengthen your competence in three interrelated areas: disciplined awareness, a guiding mindset, and a practical skill set. This book will help you cultivate all three areas.
To kick things off, in the next chapter I’ll share a story that will set up the rest of the book by reviewing a few basic concepts from Conversational Capacity and introducing you to a few new ones. From there, I’ll move into the three main parts of the book in which you’ll explore ways to sharpen your awareness, transform your mindset, and build your skill set.
Awareness (Chapters 2–5)
This section will focus on the relationship between conversational capacity and three kinds of awareness:
1. Disciplined awareness. The ability to direct your attention and hold it on the object of your choice.
2. Personal awareness. The ability to train your mindful awareness on your internal state so you quickly recognize when you’re at risk of being triggered. This ability, you’ll see, is the key to three mental activities: catching, naming, and taming.
3. Situational awareness. You’ll also learn to focus on people, patterns, and purpose; on what your team or organization is trying to accomplish; and whether behavior—yours and that of others—supports or subverts that goal.
Mindset (Chapters 6–9)
The mindset is the key to building your conversational capacity because it refocuses your attention on clear values and goals that you choose to make more important than feeling comfy or being right. In this book, I’ll not just show you how to remain more learning-focused under pressure, I’ll introduce an expanded set of characteristics that bring more power and concentration to your conversational North Star.
Skills (Chapters 10–14)
The skill set consists of four basic behaviors for making the conversational capacity mindset active, skills that help you keep your actions and your intentions aligned under pressure. To be clear, these behaviors won’t rid you of your knee-jerk emotional reactions. They’ll just help you act more deliberately and effectively despite them. Put differently, you’ll be less a victim of your habitual defensive reactions because you’ll be able to replace them with the proper skills for staying balanced. I’ll therefore help you dramatically improve your understanding of these skills, as well as your ability to employ them.
You’ll also explore a variety of ways to turn your workplace into a space for regular practice, a dojo for practicing these behaviors while you’re doing meaningful work. Finally, to wrap it all up, I’ll help you put together a personal plan for making the learning stick.
One Last Thing
I’m not writing this book as the perfect master of my tendencies, but as a practitioner repeatedly humbled by the power of his min and “win” reactions to subvert his good intentions. I offer this book as someone who works hard at better managing my emotions every day of my life, and I’m encouraging you to do the same. It requires serious effort, but it’s worth it. Why, you ask? I’ll give you five reasons:
• First, learning these skills is easier than not learning them. When you lack the ability to stay balanced and non-reactive under pressure, the world is a far more intimidating and frustrating place.
• Second, by learning these skills you’ll bring more meaning to your work. You spend a tremendous amount of time in the workplace to earn a living. Wouldn’t it be nice to get far more out of your time than just a paycheck?
• Third, even if the organization never improves you’ll still bolste
r your personal effectiveness. In this sense, the workplace becomes your own personal gymnasium for building your conversational capacity; it is something you’ll take with you everywhere in life—to your home, friends, community, new roles, or future places of employment.
• Fourth, as you grow more socially intelligent and emotionally disciplined you’ll set a constructive example that sets you apart from your more volatile, less disciplined associates.
• Fifth, when you think about it, what else are you going to do with your time at work? I mean, really. If you have to work, you might as well get more out of it than just remuneration, a cynical attitude, a facial tic or an ulcer, and the depressing sense that you’re wasting a big chunk of your life. It is better to put in the additional effort to build your ability to converse in the sweet spot, and, in the process, increase your strength, balance, and resilience. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
My main point is this: While it’s possible to avoid the work of building your conversational capacity, it’s impossible to avoid the consequences of not building it.
* There is nothing wrong with winning. If you are playing tennis or chess, competing to win is what makes it fun. But in a conversation, the need to “win”—to be right, to get your way, to get people to adopt your point of view—is often counterproductive. It turns the conversation into a zero-sum contest that cripples learning. So, when I talk about the “win” tendency I always use quotation marks.
* For a short refresher on the concept of “taking your ego to the mat,” see Conversational Capacity, pages 118–120.
THE CASE OF STEVE
The Key to Conversational Leadership Lies in Your Capacity to Influence
Communication is the real work of leadership.
—NITIN NOHRIA
Giving feedback to a boss is never easy. But it’s particularly difficult when the feedback is about your boss’s menacing reactions to negative information. You risk falling victim to the very problem you’re trying to solve.
In this chapter, I’ll set the stage for the rest of the book by sharing a story of someone addressing this very issue. The story chronicles the experience of Steve, a manager who used the conversational capacity skills to raise a challenging issue with his new boss—a risky conversation his colleagues urged him to avoid. But, despite these hurdles, Steve, low-key and studious by nature, and not someone you’d expect to adopt this forbidding challenge, initiated a powerful conversation that sparked a surprising and powerful lesson—for both his boss and the team.
I first met Steve, the new director of operations, at a workshop I conducted as part of the leadership development curriculum at his firm in Silicon Valley. To prepare, participants were asked to identify a leadership challenge that they wanted to tackle and identify a specific conversation required to address it. The problem was to be difficult and nontrivial—something that would have a big impact on the business but tough to address.
Steve chose to address the gap between the espoused values of his new boss, Phil, and Phil’s actual behavior. But when Steve shared this goal, the other members of Phil’s executive team reacted with alarm. Yes, they agreed that it was an important issue, but they disagreed with Steve’s goal of approaching Phil about it.
“Pick something else,” one said.
“That’s a bonehead move,” snapped another.
Another colleague declared that raising the issue with Phil would be “career suicide.”
A Little Background
The problem Steve wanted to solve is as commonplace as it is corrosive. Phil was a stickler for accurate, timely information, and he insisted his people talk to him straight whenever there was a problem. And this wasn’t just lip service. Phil consistently hired and promoted people who would tell it to him like it is. It was Steve’s down-to-earth but straightforward style, in fact, that won him the job.
“You were by far the most straightforward person we talked to,” Phil told him after he was hired. “Everyone who interviewed you thought you were the person for the role. There wasn’t even a close second.” Steve was thrilled to land the position.
But as he settled into his new job Steve began to see a disturbing gap between what Phil said and how Phil actually behaved. His rhetoric notwithstanding, Phil made it difficult for others to talk openly with him. On several occasions Steve witnessed Phil snap in a meeting—rolling his eyes, raising his voice, and firing off a string of sharp, biting questions.
Worse yet, this reaction usually occurred when someone was sharing bad news. Steve recently spent nearly 30 minutes trying to calm down a traumatized project manager whom Phil had grilled in a meeting. Steve learned that there was even a new nickname for Phil’s behavior: “The Gestapo Interrogation.”
The problem was that Phil’s reactions were being widely discussed around the division and people were more and more reluctant to give Phil critical news for fear of incurring his wrath. (Steve actually had someone looking into a rumor that several managers were withholding information about a delay in a critical project for fear of Phil’s response.) Steve’s primary concern was that important information would be increasingly covered up or distorted if Phil’s behavior continued, and that the impact on the business would be dire.
Despite the stern warnings from his colleagues, Steve stuck with his plan, and my workshop afforded him the opportunity to prepare for this important but difficult intervention. “We all know it’s a big problem, and we’re all talking about it behind Phil’s back,” Steve said, “so I’m willing to bring it up with him. But it makes me nervous. I know it won’t be easy.”
The Fork in the Road
Steve’s choice reflects the two primary options everyone faces when they see a problem: Sit back and do nothing or take action and try to solve it. While his teammates advocated the passive approach, Steve chose the active one. His willingness to take action was fueled by the attitude: “This problem won’t go away if I don’t give it a go.” The exercise of real leadership always begins with an affirmative stance.
But Steve’s no dummy. He’s facing a 10/10 conversation and he knows that he’s in over his head.* To be effective, he realizes, he’ll need more than good intentions; he’ll need practice. So, despite all his misgivings, Steve declared his intention to address the issue as well as his eagerness for assistance.
“I’ll minimize like crazy if I don’t get some help,” he admitted.
Developing a Game Plan
In his upcoming conversation with Phil, Steve faces an intentional conflict† of formidable proportions: He wants to solve the problem but at the same time he doesn’t want to commit “career suicide.” He also knows that to achieve the former and avoid the latter he’ll need practice. But what does he need to practice? Skills that increase his conversational capacity—the ability to remain candid and courageous, yet curious and humble—even under withering pressure.
When I asked the participants in my workshop to break into small groups for practice, Steve chose the two colleagues who were most convinced he shouldn’t make the attempt. In an impressive, Lincolnesque move, he picked his own little team of rivals. Who better, after all, to help him prepare for this tough conversation than the two people who are most adamant he shouldn’t do it? They’ll be his most ruthlessly compassionate partners; the cops to his architect; the coaching sand in his conversational oyster.*
I asked Steve and his cohorts to work through a simple process to develop a conversational game plan. (I’ll share this process with you in Chapter 15.) Not only did they practice during the workshop, Steve later told me that he and his colleagues got together for more practice after the workshop ended. He was determined to go into this conversation highly prepared.
The Conversation with Phil
A few days later Steve went in for his talk with Phil. After some brief small talk, he got right to the point: “I’ve got something I’d like to bring up with you and it’s not going to be easy for me to say, and I’m pretty sure i
t’s not going to be easy for you to hear. Please keep in mind that I’m really trying to help.”
Phil sat up and nodded, so Steve led off with his position: “Phil, I’ve never worked for someone who’s more open about his need for timely and accurate information as you, and I applaud that. But despite your good intentions I think you act in ways that make it really difficult for people to do what you’re asking.” (This is a clear position expressed in just two sentences.)
Steve then shared the underlying thinking that informed his position: “That’s very hard for me to say to you, and I’m sure you’re not happy to hear it, so let me explain what I’ve been seeing around here that makes me think we’ve got a problem, and then I’d like to get your thoughts on it all.” He went on to describe the hallway conversations, the reactions in meetings, the coaching he provided to the shell-shocked project manager. Steve even shared the new nickname people had for their meetings with Phil: “They call it ‘The Gestapo Interrogation.’”
Steve then added another powerful example. “I was told by several of my colleagues that I shouldn’t even bring this up with you,” he said. “One person said I’d be committing ‘career suicide.’ That’s how bad it’s getting.”
“My biggest concern,” Steve continued, “is that if this behavior continues you’ll get less and less information about what’s really going on in the business and the consequences could be severe. Again, I know this can’t be easy to hear.” Steve then employed an empathetic test that was suggested by one of his colleagues in their practice sessions: “Push back on me here,” he said, “especially if you think I’m being unfair.”
